Thursday, March 4, 2010

Quotables with Lori Lansens

When I'm reading, I love coming across "just-right" passages that have me reaching for my quote book. Quotables is an event in which I present authors with a meaningful (to me) passage from their novels and ask them to speak to it in whatever way they wish.

I just finished The Wife's Taleby Lori Lansens, an emotional and empowering story of a woman who finds herself in the journey to find the husband who's left her.

One part of the book that really stuck with me was a conversation between the main character and her father:

Shortly before he'd passed, Mary'd confided to Orin her sense of feeling stuck and unbound all at once, her failed attempts at optimism, her sense that she could only see the glass half empty, to which he'd responded impatiently, "Forget about the glass, Murray. Get a drink from the hose and push on."

From the author:

This passage really speaks to the notion of "happiness" -- a motif in the book. As Mary ponders her own lack of fulfillment and what she thinks of as her "abstract malaise," her father, a pragmatist, urges her to just "get on with it."

I'm with Orin. I think we North Americans spend too much time thinking about ourselves in general -- our weight, our needs, our wealth or lack of wealth, etc. Mary decides, as she becomes enlightened, that happiness may simply be the absence of fear. Her sense of fullfillment is strongest when she's thinking about other people and life on a grander scale.

When she stops wondering how to find "happiness," Mary grows to understand that it's there, woven into her rich tapestry of emotion and experience.